William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea to Host Collaborative Residency with Brown Arts Institute

In spring 2024, William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea will host a collaborative residency with Brown Arts Institute (BAI), launching the second project of its IGNITE Series, which was inaugurated in fall 2023 with Carrie Mae Weems’ campus-wide activation, Varying Shades of Brown. The semester-long residency will involve three activations that unfold across campus from February 9 to June 16, 2024.

The collaborative residency, hosted by Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace, co-founder of The Centre, will feature performances of a dramatic work, Houseboy; arts education workshops; and post-show conversations in the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center, as well as a video installation in Cohen Gallery, housed in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. Each aspect of the project invites the Brown and Rhode Island communities to join in surfacing, rupturing, and re-reading complex narrative histories and the visual archive for the contemporary moment. In addition to public facing programming, The Centre will activate their IGNITE technical residency as an iterative platform for developing new work and engaging community, anchored in the use of arts research and cross-disciplinary artistry.

“We’re thrilled to host this project with William Kentridge, Bronwyn Lace and The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Their long history of experimentation and collaboration cultivates the types of open-ended moments for engagement that we are eager to host on campus,” said BAI Artistic Director Avery Willis Hoffman. “This residency invites our communities to participate in and learn from the creative practice of boundary-pushing contemporary artists, and to understand IGNITE as an incubator for new and evolving ideas that foster a lifelong process of exploration.”

Kentridge and The Centre are supported as part of BAI’s Artistic Innovators Collective, a fluid group of around 40 artists across disciplines who convene regularly on campus and work closely with campus communities through various teaching opportunities, research support and grants, and the presentation of a range of work from early ideas to full-scale commissions. Rooted in a practice of rigorous arts research and BAI’s mission to support, amplify, and add new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and surrounding communities, the Artistic Innovators Collective informs the development of BAI’s integrated artistic and academic programming, including through IGNITE.

IGNITE, a series of interdisciplinary, collaborative, and impactful projects centered around the possibilities of art as a vehicle for societal change, began in fall 2023 and will run through fall 2024, anchored by six large-scale imaginings and collaborative residencies: Carrie Mae Weems (fall 2023); William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea (spring 2024); Tanya Tagaq (spring 2024); Chachi Carvalho (summer 2024); Kym Moore, Professor of Theatre Arts & Performance Studies at Brown (fall 2024); and Caridad “La Bruja” de la Luz (fall 2024). These boundary-pushing projects will activate The Lindemann Performing Arts Center, a new arts venue located in the heart of Brown’s Perelman Arts District and designed by REX/Joshua Ramus, which takes a radical approach to spatial, acoustic, and technical flexibility to enable new forms of artistic research and creation, and which opened in October 2023.

ABOUT THE BROWN ARTS INSTITUTE COLLABORATIVE RESIDENCY

PART I: Houseboy

Public performances: February 9, 2024 at 7pm; February 10, 2024 at 3pm

The Lindemann Performing Arts Center

Tickets on sale January 10, 2024

Developed at The Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, South Africa, and directed by William Kentridge, Houseboy is based on the 1956 novel by Cameroonian diplomat Ferdinand Oyono. Told through the diary of the protagonist Toundi Ondoua, Houseboy makes use of an ensemble cast to explore themes of narrative history, archival memory, and post-colonial identity through the lens of the colonized. A large backdrop produced by Kentridge—palm trees and dense foliage in black—sets the scene, and each character remains present on stage throughout while myriad live percussive sounds from just off stage, both punctuate and set the pace of the narrative. Post-performance conversations by Kentridge and Company will follow each evening’s presentation.

PART II: Pepper’s Ghost Exploration

Public sharings: February 22-23, 2024 at 6pm

Fishman Studio, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

Following two weeks of residency work on campus, in collaboration with Brown students, scholars, subject matter experts, and arts community members, The Centre for the Less Good Idea will share two public showings of their Pepper’s Ghost exploration on campus. Named after John Henry Pepper, who popularized it in 1862, Pepper’s Ghost is a theatrical illusion technique that uses a half-silvered mirror to create a hologram-esque figure. The Centre expands on this image-based technique to create illusory performative and narrative presentations, as live physical and musical performance interact with video installation. Audiences will note that this technique was also interpreted by Carrie Mae Weems in her recent installation, Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me, at Brown’s Bell Gallery. Aspects of this collaborative residency will inform future projects, including The Great Yes, The Great No, premiering at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France in July 2024 as part of the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence.

The Great YES, the Great NO, conceived and directed by William Kentridge with Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Phala O. Phala as a project of The Centre for the Less Good Idea and produced by THE OFFICE performing arts + film, follows a boat trip from Marseille to Martinique—a small island that was an important site for many well-known figures including Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, André Breton, and Josephine Baker. Using the potential of the boat as a metaphor for power, trade, migration, and more, the production will draw on many of the processes and methodologies that have become central to both Kentridge and The Centre’s ways of working. Foundational commissioning support for the development and creation of The Great YES, The Great NO is provided by Brown Arts Institute. The performance will return to Brown in 2025-26.

PART III: No, It Is (2012)

On view April 26-June 16, 2024

Cohen Gallery, Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts

A triptych video installation translates Kentridge’s flip book, No, It Is (2012) into a film format across three flat screens, including Workshop Receipts, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Practical Enquiries. The videos will run continuously in Brown’s Cohen Gallery, concluding the residency with an extended opportunity for the community to engage with works on campus. This installation is courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art and a gift of Tom and Alice Tisch.

For more information, visit arts.brown.edu/william-kentridge-and-centre-less-good-idea.

About William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea

William Kentridge is a draughtsman, performer, filmmaker, and is the founder of The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Kentridge is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre, and opera productions. Embracing collaboration and cross-pollination of various media and genres, including performance, film, literature, and more, his work frequently responds to the legacies of colonialism and apartheid, within the context of South Africa’s sociopolitical landscape.

In 2016, William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace founded The Centre for the Less Good Idea, a space for responsive thinking through experimental, collaborative and cross-disciplinary arts practices, based in Maboneng, Johannesburg. The Centre has quickly gathered momentum and by 2022 has become a formative space for arts projects in South Africa and beyond. Between 2016 and 2022, over 400 individual performances, films and installations have been created and shown at The Centre and more than 700 artists of all disciplines have worked on projects at The Centre.

About Brown Arts Institute (BAI)

Brown Arts Institute, part of the Perelman Arts District, is a university-wide research enterprise and catalyst for the arts at Brown that creates new work and supports, amplifies, and adds new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and community. Through year-round programming, research-focused courses, initiatives, collaborations, and partnerships, along with rigorous artistic and academic programs, BAI commissions and presents new work on campus, across Providence, Rhode Island, and beyond, from students, faculty, and on-campus arts groups, as well as in collaboration with forward-focused visiting artists and other performing arts organizations.